Pretty Girls

He had called three times so far, which meant she’d wasted an hour feeling paralyzed. Lydia was in grave danger. Her safety depended on Claire. Paul was always driving when he called Claire on the phone, so she had to think that Lydia was still in the trunk. Whether or not that meant she was all right was debatable, because eventually, Paul would get to wherever he was going.

Claire had no idea what to do. She was good at quick, thoughtless reactions, but strategizing had never been her way. Paul was the one who saw all of the angles, and before Paul she had relied on Lydia, and before Lydia there was her father to swoop down and make everything all right.

No one was going to solve this for her. There was no one else she could think of to reach out to, which made her angry, because she should be able to depend on her mother, but Helen had made it clear a long time ago that she couldn’t be counted on. She had hidden the truth about Julia for almost nineteen years. She could’ve ended Claire’s misery, but she chose not to, probably because she didn’t want to deal with the emotional fallout.

Claire looked down at the dirt between her feet. She let her mind run wild in the hopes that somehow, she would stumble onto a solution.

The foiled burglary during the funeral. Claire was certain that Paul had hired those men to break into the Dunwoody house. They must have been looking for the key tag. Maybe Congressman Johnny Jackson had sent Captain Mayhew for the same reason. Or Agent Nolan. Or both of them, which would explain why they had behaved like two unneutered cats around each other.

Was Johnny Jackson working for Paul or against him?

The answer was most likely on the USB drive inside the key tag. The damn thing had been in Claire’s purse during the funeral. She had switched out the bag she was carrying the day of the murder to a black clutch and thrown in Paul’s keys because it was easier than going downstairs and putting them on his little labeled hook inside his mudroom cabinet.

So, she knew what the burglars were looking for, but she had no idea how that could help Lydia.

“Think,” Claire chided herself. “You have to think.”

She had one more hour before Paul gave her his plan to retrieve the USB drive. Her first impulse had been to call Adam Quinn and tell him she needed the key tag back, but if Paul was really monitoring all of the phones, then she would be giving away that the drive was not sitting in evidence at the police station.

And if he knew Claire didn’t have the drive, there was no reason for him to keep Lydia alive.

Claire had to keep Paul believing that the cops had the drive. That could buy her some time, but she didn’t know how much time. She could pretend to call Rayman, or even pretend to go to the police station, but there would come a point at which Paul would want to know why she wasn’t making progress.

And there was the very real possibility that her continued failure would cause greater harm to come to Lydia. Claire knew full well from the videos that there were things a man could do to a woman that didn’t kill her, but made her wish she was dead.

Was Paul telling the truth about his role in the movies? She would be a fool to take him at his word. There was some consolation in knowing that her husband was not the man in the mask. The telltale moles under Paul’s left shoulder blade were the giveaway. But someone had zoomed in that camera to get a close-­up of the girls. Someone else had been in the room recording, witnessing, every degradation.

That someone had to be Paul. The Fuller house was his house. He had obviously been here. No one else would bother to keep everything so clean and organized.

Which meant that Paul knew the identity of the masked man. Her husband was friends or partners with a vicious psychopath who was stealing girls from their families and committing unspeakable horrors against them.

Claire’s body gave a violent, involuntary shudder at the thought.

Was that what Paul had stored on the USB drive—­proof of the masked man’s identity? Claire broke out into a cold sweat. Paul had said she was safe, but if he was threatening to expose the murderer, then that put everyone in danger.

And it meant that yet again, Claire had caught her husband in another lie.

Rick.

Claire could call Rick Butler for help. He was Lydia’s boyfriend. They had been together for thirteen years. He was a mechanic. He looked like the kind of man who would know his way around a bad situation. According to Paul’s files, he’d been in and out of jail.

No. If Claire knew anything about her sister, she knew that Lydia would not want Rick involved. Bringing in Rick would mean bringing in her daughter, and then suddenly, Paul went from having one victim to ransom to having three.

And Claire could not help thinking that Dee Delgado looked exactly like the kind of girl who ended up in Paul’s movies.

Claire stood up. She couldn’t sit anymore. She couldn’t go back into the house because everything was monitored. Or maybe it wasn’t monitored and Claire was still as gullible as before. She put her hands on her hips and stared up at the sky. Asking herself what Paul would do had gotten her here in the first place. Maybe she should ask herself what Lydia would do.

Lydia would want more information.

When Claire had first opened the door to the garage, her gaze had instantly fallen on the rows of VHS tapes, but she knew there were other things in that room that might give her clues as to what Paul was really up to. There were metal shelves that held various computer-­related equipment. There was a worktop in the corner with a large computer screen. That computer was probably connected to the Internet.

She went back inside the house. She tracked the hidden cameras with her eyes—­first the one in the kitchen, then the one in the den, then the one mounted on a shelf at the end of the hallway that led to the one-­car garage.

Women had been savagely murdered in that garage. Countless, damaged women had been defiled while a camera recorded every bit of their agony.

Claire pushed open the door. The stench of blood was overwhelming, but the sight of the room was not. She was already habituated to the violence. Maybe that explained the cavalier way Paul had discussed the movies, as if he were talking about widgets instead of lives. How many women had been murdered in this room over the years before Paul

became habituated to death?

How long before the excitement of the kill was programmed into his brain?

Claire stepped down into the garage. She rubbed her arms to fight the chill. She was struck by an intense unease. Her body had a visceral reaction to the evil that had happened inside this room. So many women had lost their lives. But it wasn’t just that. The farther she went into the garage, the farther she was from escape. Someone could walk in on her. Someone could shut the door.

Claire looked back at the empty doorway. Her mind flashed up a terrifying image of the masked man’s wet smile filling the computer screen.

And then she saw the mask for herself.

It was hanging on a hook by the door. The eyes and mouth were unzipped. The rubber underwear hung on another hook beside it, and on a shelf underneath both was a large bottle of Johnson’s Baby Powder and a small tube of Wet personal lubricant. Claire forced herself to look away. The juxtaposition was too unsettling.

Plastic slats took up the rest of the wall by the door. She recognized the tools of torture hanging from metal hooks: the cattle prod, the branding iron with the large X at the end, the machete. They were all hung the same distance apart. The machete blade was cleaned to a mirror finish. The charger for the cattle prod had the cord neatly coiled around the base. She might as well be standing in Paul’s garage back home.

A familiar Gladiator workbench was set up in front of the metal garage door.

Thick foam insulation panels were stuck to the back of the door. The whole room felt warm despite the chill in the air. She assumed Paul had insulated everything with spray foam, because that was what Paul did.

Claire checked behind a loose black curtain, which could be pulled closed to hide the room from the road when Paul opened the garage door. Leaves had blown in under the lip of the door. It wasn’t like her husband to let things like that go.